You Can't Change the World Without Your Feelings

By Safina Center Community Organizing Fellow Mikaela Loach

Mikaela Loach and students from the Loach Class in London with her new book Climate Is Just The Start. ©Mikaela Loach

The weight of the crisis we are in has been heavy on my heart this year. More than others, this number—2025—feels significant. It’s a number that I once wrote into strategy documents, into communications, into demands charged on the streets outside of parliament, for when we needed transformational change to save us all from going beyond climate tipping points. We haven’t had the change I was organizing for yet. In many ways, the world has revealed more horrors to us and shattered my heart in ways I didn’t know were possible: thousands of children in Gaza killed before their first birthdays; over ten thousand more robbed of reaching adulthood, of going to school, of having parents. The existential threat here is not a possible future one: it is here and how for people in Palestine and in the Pacific Island nations being submerged by rising seas. I have been processing a lot of grief for what has already been lost, what will be lost and the fact that all of this quite simply does not have to be this way: there are other, better choices than this.

In the midst of all of these feelings, I’ve launched a children’s book into the world. Climate Is Just The Start was published by Random House Children’s in March and received a starred review from Booklist, another rousing review from Kirkus and was awarded a Junior Library Guild Gold Selection. It also became a bestseller in the UK (Hive and Bookshop.org). I’m so grateful for all of these things: that I get to write, that those words are read widely and that they are well received by the publishing industry and readers alike. It is an immense privilege, as a former medical student, one I never expected to have. Seeing kids read the book for the first time was a truly magical experience. To celebrate publication, I visited the London Fields Primary School who have a classroom there named after me (what I’m most proud of!). The kids were unbelievably excited to read the book out to the class. It was so moving to see how much they wanted this book: kids care so much and have such huge hearts for justice. I shed many tears looking at their shining faces that day. 

It has felt strange to celebrate a book whilst holding such heavy feelings, but spending time with these amazing kids, reading Climate Is Just The Start with them, I was reminded yet again of something so important: it will never be “too late.” I could never tell these kids I have given up. I could never say that any action to make the world, the present and the future, a better and more liberated place to live “isn’t worth it.” It will always, always, always be worth it. Even if we can’t save everything, even once we have sat with the grief of all that has been lost and all that might be lost, whatever we can save matters. Our actions have already saved so much, more than we will ever know. It is harder to quantify what we have prevented than it is to see what we have failed to save.

Reading the Introduction to Climate Is Just The Start many times these months has been a good reminder for me in the midst of this all, that "You Can’t Change The World Without Your Feelings.” To channel these feelings, not dismiss them, is vital. I’m not driven by a certainty that I can and will get the world that we deserve. I’m driven by love: for the kids in the Loach Class; for my friend Kato in Tuvalu who continues to fight to save his home from rising sea levels; for the uncles in Jamaica fighting for beach access; for kids in Palestine who I’ve never met but who I think about every day as I organize in my local community for their freedom; for our AWETHU students; for every blade of grass, piece of coral, every being that breathes. Making anything better is worth it. Saving anyone is worth it. Feeling the grief and channeling it into action is always worth it.